Tuesday, 20 January 2015

Seventy-three years
ago today, on 20th January 1942, fifteen Nazi officials met in
an elegant villa at Wannsee outside Berlin
to discuss genocide. It was not a
disagreeable meeting, only around 90 minutes or so followed by a buffet lunch,
but it has gone down in history as one of the lowest points to which humanity
has stooped.

The Wannsee Villa - a beautiful location for a hideous act

The convenor of
the conference was Reinhard Heydrich, the archetypal Nazi ‘superman’, Himmler’s
deputy in the SS and the head of the Reich Security Main Office. Assisted by Adolf Eichmann, the desk-bound
perpetrator whose trial in 1961 would spawn Hannah Arendt’s memorable phrase
about “the banality of evil”, Heydrich had assembled a dozen or so other
representatives of the main ministries and organisations of the Third Reich,
including the SS, Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry and Gestapo. Most of those present were comparative
unknowns: they were not generally the ministers themselves, but their
lieutenants; senior civil servants, the mandarins of the Nazi state. This was no Nazi rabble, therefore. Eight of those present had a Doctorate, most
of them in law.

In the public
mind, the Wannsee Conference is often perceived as the ’smoking gun’ in Nazi
Holocaust planning: a rare moment when senior Nazis openly discussed their
plans for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, thereby providing the
organisational and logistical basis upon which the Holocaust was
constructed. Yet, such an interpretation
is too simplistic. On its seventy-third anniversary, it is fitting to examine what the Wannsee Conference was, what it
wasn’t, and why it is still important.

There are a
number of aspects that argue against the Wannsee Conference being interpreted
simply as the ‘kick-off’ meeting for the Holocaust. For one thing, the Holocaust was already
underway by the time the conference was convened early in 1942. The invasion of the Soviet
Union the previous summer had seen a systematic targeting of
Jewish civilians, whilst the deportation and execution of Reich Jews had begun
already in the autumn of 1941. Also, it
is hard to see Wannsee serving any logistical purpose in planning the Holocaust
when no representative of German Railways – the organisation most intimately
involved with the logistics of the genocide – was present in the room.

Moreover, if it
was as important to the Holocaust as is often assumed, it seems strange that
Wannsee was accorded only a 90 minute meeting, with a handful of civil
servants, and produced a written protocol – drawn up subsequently by Eichmann
and sent to all participants – of only 15 pages. That protocol is also perplexingly vague for
a document of such supposed importance.
Of course, its wording was ‘sanitised’ at Heydrich’s insistence, but it
is still notable that, though it addresses the issues of deportation and of
mixed-race Jews, it makes no mention of the gas chambers then being developed,
or any of the death camps that would come into operation later that year. Instead, it makes only a single oblique reference
to “preparatory activities” and refers to Jews dying off from “natural
diminution”, through being used as forced labour, with the remnant being
“treated accordingly”. Whatever it did,
then, Wannsee was clearly not intended to provide the blueprint for the
Holocaust.

So, what was the
Wannsee Conference for? The
constellation of those present – with all organisations and ministries
represented – gives a clue as to its primary purpose. The conference was mainly concerned with
pushing through a key policy against the background of endemic administrative
infighting within the Third Reich, where rival agencies often competed in a
quasi-Darwinian struggle to gain favour and status. Before his audience at Wannsee, therefore,
Heydrich was careful to set out his bona
fides as the prime mover in the development of Nazi policy towards the
Jews, and cowed his potential rivals into acquiescing to his overlordship on
the matter.

In addition, he
was anxious to bind those present – and by extension their departments and
organisations – into the new arrangement, to establish common complicity and
prevent later backsliding. In his
invitation to the conference, Heydrich had given the purpose of the meeting as
that of establishing “a common position among the central authorities” with
regard to the final solution of the Jewish question. That ‘position’, as Heydrich saw it, was that
they would be working together, but that he was in charge. He was attempting, as Eichmann would later
suggest at his trial, to “nail down” the mandarins.

Contrary to the
assumptions of many, therefore, the Wannsee Conference did not mark the point
at which the policy of genocide was arrived at – that, it seems, had occurred
some weeks earlier. Neither was it
intended to inform those present of a newly-decided policy – few in the room
would have been surprised by what Heydrich had to say. Rather, it appears that Wannsee was as much
about administrative squabbling within the Third Reich as it was actually about
the Holocaust. It represented Heydrich
seeking to exercise his control over a vitally important policy area and
ensuring that none of those present could later claim that they had understood
things differently.

Why, then, is
Wannsee still important? For one thing,
it was symptomatic of the pervasive culture of administrative conflict within
the Third Reich. The conference did not
decisively cut the Gordian Knot of inter-agency wrangling, as Eichmann would
later testify in Jerusalem,
but it certainly established one of the most radical and most dynamic players –
until his assassination at least – at the head of events. In that respect, alone, it was to be of
profound significance.

Most
importantly, however, the Wannsee Protocol is the closest the Nazis came to
setting down their intentions for the Holocaust in writing, and those
intentions were nothing if not ambitious.
Of the 11 million Jews in Europe in
1942, half were in countries beyond German control, yet they were included in
Heydrich’s reckoning nonetheless.
Moreover, though it was itself only a snapshot in the evolving policy of
the Third Reich towards European Jewry, Wannsee nonetheless reflected something
of a step-change, from the rather haphazard, ad-hoc, deportations and massacres
of late 1941, to the clear programme of extermination that would follow. As such, though our precise understanding of
its significance might shift, the Wannsee Conference fully deserves its place
among the very darkest chapters of human history.